Java String.replace/replaceAll not working

Question

So, I'm trying to parse a String input in Java that contains (opening) square brackets. I have str.replace("\\[", ""), but this does absolutely nothing. I've tried replaceAll also, with more than one different regex, but the output is always unchanged. Part of me wonders if this is possibly caused by the fact that all my back-slash characters appear as yen symbols (ever since I added Japanese to my languages), but it's been that way for over a year and hasn't caused me any issues like this before.

Any idea what I might be doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Strings are immutable in Java. Make sure you re-assign the return value to the same String variable:

str = str.replaceAll("\\[", "");

For the normal replace method, you don't need to escape the bracket:

str = str.replace("[", "");